If they nominated Biden, the general election campaign would be nerve-wracking for Democrats. And if Biden won, his presidency would not be all balm.

Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado recently made a pitch on Twitter that a lot of voters across America might find persuasive: “If you elect me president, I promise you won’t have to think about me for 2 weeks at a time. I’ll do my job watching out for North Korea and ending this trade war. So you can go raise your kids and live your lives.”

Alas for Bennet, and perhaps all of us, he has not electrified the electorate. In fact, he’s at .3% in the Real Clear Politics average of South Carolina primary polls and invisible — as in, doesn’t even register — in the six other states and national polling RCP is tracking.

What worries me is that the third of Democrats who support former Vice President Joe Biden may believe he will be a similarly stabilizing force: someone who will quietly take care of business and not force Americans to think and fret constantly about their commander in chief.

“Does anybody really believe he is mentally fit to be president? We are 'playing’ in a very big and complicated world. Joe doesn’t have a clue!” President Donald Trump tweeted of Biden on Saturday night. Does anybody really believe this is not a preview of the campaign if Biden were to win the Democratic nomination?

Former Vice President Joe Biden at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 8, 2019, in Des Moines.(Photo: Kelsey Kremer/The Register)

Trump is, of course, the real person without a clue of how to play in the big complicated world. While Biden was making verbal slips and mostly cleaning them up as he went along, Trump was advertising his cluelessness about North Korea to the whole world on Twitter. (“A small apology for testing the short range missiles”? And to make it stop, all we need to do is stop military exercises with South Korea? OK, then, sounds good!)

This is the classic Trump projection playbook. Remember when Hillary Clinton called him Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet? “No, you’re the puppet,” he said, and his devotees believed it.

Trump's North Korea and Biden tweets accounted for only three of his 13 tweets Saturday. Others castigated "Fake News" the "seriously dishonest and unhinged Lamestream Media," the "corrupt" press, "wacko" comedian Bill Maher, "totally incapable" former aide Anthony Scaramucci, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and China (ripping off America). Oh, and notable even amid that stream of invective, there was the retweet of a conspiracy theorist trying to tie Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Epstein's death in prison. From a president! And all on one day!

A nerve-wracking nominee

In a one-on-one race, Trump would have endless attack fodder that mirrors his own far more serious flaws and could help neutralize them, from Biden’s insensitive handling of the Anita Hill hearing in 1991 (to counter Trump’s women problem), to his verbal slips (to undercut the problems of Trump's own word salad and limited, repetitive vocabulary), to Biden's tendency to tell voters that if they like their private or employer-based health insurance, they can keep it (recalling President Barack Obama's utterly unrealistic promise that PolitiFact named lie of the year in 2013 — and which Trump could use to divert from his own constant lies).

Biden would bring administrative experience to the government (among his other vice presidential responsibilities, he successfully oversaw the distribution of nearly $800 billion in stimulus money), not to mention a heart in the right place. His likability is off the charts, and he certainly understands the threat Trump poses to America's identity, values and future.

But he is not Obama. It would be a nerve-wracking campaign for Democrats, and if he won, a Biden presidency would not be all balm. Could Democrats relax if they were always worrying about what he would say next? And that's not even counting the millions of voters who would be on edge about Biden possibly giving away the store to his good friend in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

Don't wallow in nostalgia

After both Biden and Trump messed up the sites of the shootings (Trump placed the Dayton tragedy in Toledo), one tweeter pleaded with Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to take the wheel. She’s not that much younger than Biden and Trump, but she exudes capability. This is a woman who dreamed up and then set up a large government agency (the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). Now she has an important plan to rebuild the State Department and our diplomatic corps (seriously, our government is going to be in shambles by the time Trump leaves and we’ll need to rebuild everything, not just State).

Of course, Warren also exudes big, expensive liberal plans and a professorial intensity that turns some people off. She's not a perfect candidate by any means, and neither is any other Democrat. It is a tall order, trying to find someone who is both tough enough to take on Trump and low-key enough to calm a roiled nation. Maybe Democrats should be looking at a ticket that includes one of each.

Should Biden be on it? Democrats should weigh that decision carefully, and make it based not on warm nostalgia but on cold calculation.